Modifying an author's original work without specified permission; regardless of new findings, constitutes a copyright infringement. On 12/13/08, Christian Huitema <huitema@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote: >> You can improve any technology you want, modulo IPR -- that's not the >> point here. The problem is taking existing copyrighted text and using >> it as a base for describing your technology. > > That's indeed the problem we stumbled upon years ago. Suppose that a > contributor has written a complete description of technology X, getting it > published as a 100 pages RFC. A remarkable feat, and a great contribution to > the community. A few years letter, the working group realizes that they like > the technology, but would like to change a couple options. That normally > translates into changing a paragraph or two, resulting in a new RFC, more > than 90% identical to the previous one. > > Suppose now that for whatever reasons, the original author disagrees with > the changes, or with the new management of the working group, or with the > new editor. People are human, these things do happen. IANAL, but my > understanding at the time was that the original copyright still applied to > the original text, and that the working group would be left with only bad > options. They could issue a delta RFC that only contained the modifications, > but that is somewhat confusing for the readers. Or they could undertake a > complete rewriting of the standard, but that takes a long time and is also > prone to errors and confusion. > > This is very much why we got the statement on copyrights in RFC 1602, in > 1996. You will notice that copyrights were only mentioned as something we > might need to worry about later in the appendix of the previous rules, RFC > 1310 published in 1992. > > -- Christian Huitema > > > _______________________________________________ > Ietf mailing list > Ietf@xxxxxxxx > https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf > -- AJ Jaghori Chief Network Architect | Author | Professor ciscoworkz@xxxxxxxxx M: 703.362.5002 _______________________________________________ Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf